Albert Einstein: "In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”
Albert Einstein "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”- Albert Einstein
"WIE: You often speak about the fact that we are at a unique juncture in human history because we now have knowledge of the fourteen billion years of cosmological evolution that brought us to this point— and that this knowledge carries with it a responsibility that we never before imagined. Can you give a basic outline of the vast scope of this evolution?
BS: it's really simple. Here's the whole story in one line. This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans.
WIE: That's the short version.
BS: That's the short version. The reason I like that version is that hydrogen gas is odorless and colorless, and in the prejudice of our Western civilization, we see it as just material stuff. There's not much there. You just take hydrogen, leave it alone, and it turns into a human—that's a pretty interesting bit of information. The point is that if humans are spiritual, then hydrogen's spiritual. it's an incredible opportunity to escape the traditional dualism—you know, spirit is up there; matter is down here. Actually, it's different. You have the matter all the way through, and so you have the spirit all the way through. So that's why I love the short version.
Okay, the longer version: Thirteen billion years ago, according to the most recent guess, the universe comes forth as elementary particles, screaming hot. it's not only trillions of degrees hot, it's also a million times denser than lead. So the universe doesn't begin as fire. It begins as this incredible dense, hot—we can't even imagine it. We just know it as some numbers. And then it begins to expand. After three hundred thousand years, it cools enough to form atoms. Those are the hydrogen atoms. And as the matter continues to cool and expand, it also begins to draw itself together into these huge clouds that we call galaxies.
When the universe is about a billion years old, the galaxies flutter into existence, whoooshh, like snowflakes falling—one hundred billion galaxies. It was an incredible moment because that was the only time in the history of the universe when galaxies could form. Before that, it was way too dense and hot. After that, it's too thin and spread out. Stephen Hawking discovered something incredible. If you look at the expansion of the universe, there's all this energy, right? it's just exploding out, and also, at the same time, you have this bonding force, gravity, that's holding it together. You've got these two opposing forces. If the gravitational force would have been slightly stronger, it would have crushed the whole universe into a black hole within a million years. Or, if the gravitational force had been weaker, it would have exploded apart and it wouldn't have formed galaxies. it's an incredible balance. The difference is one part in 10 [59]—which is a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one percent. That's how delicate it is. it's more delicate than dancing on the edge of a knife.
Later on, the galaxy is complexified in that the stars themselves burn, and the stars, to burn, transform the elements in their core. So the hydrogen is transformed into helium. And later on, it gets a lot hotter, and the helium is transformed into carbon, and so forth. All of the elements are created in the middle of the star, which then explodes. So the next star that's formed is formed out of these more complex elements, and then you have the possibility of planets. All of the elements of our body, every one of them, was forged out of a star. Walt Whitman had an intuition about this when he said," A leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars.”And you think, how did he come up with that? Well, that's called self- knowledge. In other words, a star gave birth to the elements that then assembled themselves in the form of Walt Whitman. So you could say that Walt Whitman had a deep memory of where he came from.
WIE: That's an amazing intuition.
BS: Isn't that something? How could he write that down? Likewise, when Einstein discovered the general theory of relativity, he discovered it from within. There was no data on the expansion of the universe or anything else. He said he just went into his own visceral movements—a strange way of thinking about creativity—and he paid attention to what was going on within, and he gave birth to the gravitational equations we use now. This is what I think Whitman did. He penetrated the depth of his own bodily reality and had this intuition about stars. And we've now discovered the empirical details about this. I just love that—everybody comes out of the stars.
So, to continue with our story—in certain planetary systems, life forms. That's a huge transformation. Life begins around three and a half billion years ago, and then it begins to complexify around seven hundred million years ago. And then, one strange little lineage forms— the worms. The worms actually develop a backbone and a nervous system. We're so impressed by brains. The worms created the brains. You see the theme I'm developing here? Hydrogen. It becomes us. All of matter is spiritual. And if the worms can create the brains, then creativity is everywhere!
Then we have the advanced life-forms—more advanced in the sense of more complex. There are the various stages of humanity that we've gone through; our consciousness has developed. And then: We have this moment. Now we're discovering ourselves in the midst of this story. And you see, all that went before was necessary for us to actually discover ourselves in the universe right now—all of the development of mind and instrumentation and so forth.
But the way I want to connect the story for you is to go back to the birth of the galaxies. There was one moment when the galaxies could form, not before or after. That's like our moment right now, I think. See, this is the moment for the planet to awaken to itself through the human, so that the actual dynamics of evolution have an opportunity to awaken and to begin to function at that level. It couldn't happen before, you know. And the amazing thing is, it probably won't happen afterwards. If we don't make this transition, most likely the creativity of the planet will be in such a degraded state that we won't be able to make that move. The chilling thing is that, in the universe, the really creative places can lose their creativity. We talked about the birth of the galaxies. There are two fundamentally different forms of galaxies, spiral galaxies—galaxies with spiral arms—and elliptical galaxies, which can be larger or smaller, but which don't have any internal structure. The galaxies that have spiral arms have the creativity to create new stars. So stars form. They create these elements. They disperse. Then they form another one, another star system, and it keeps going. But in elliptical galaxies, they can't. In our current understanding, spiral galaxies have collided at certain times and have destroyed their own internal structure and become elliptical galaxies. Elliptical galaxies are just sitting there, and the stars go out one by one, and that's it. So you can actually move off from the mainline sequence of creativity in the universe.
Now here we are in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy. There are two hundred billion stars. Lots of them have planets. Maybe a lot of them have intelligent life. There are approximately one hundred billion galaxies in the known universe. Obviously, lots of stars; most likely, lots of life. Who knows? But if you think of it in terms of the creativity of the universe, it may be that a lot of planets will go through the transition that we're facing now. And if they don't make it, they'll die out—like the elliptical galaxies. So the challenge before us as humans is to see that what we think of as small is immense. The very form of our consciousness has a cosmological significance that we didn't know about before. I've talked about it in an evolutionary sense, in terms of the animals and so forth, but it may go beyond that. It may have immense implications for the galaxy as a whole.
So that would be a way of thinking about the past thirteen billion years of the story—to think of the challenge before us as being a cosmological challenge. We've gone through transitions in the past that could have gone the wrong way. Then our planet would maybe still be alive, but certainly not at the level of complexity we see about us today. I don't want to suggest in any way that what's taking place is somehow engineered to happen. it's more of an adventure.”
http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j19/swimme.asp?page=2
Brian Swimme
Brian Swimme
Biography & Resources
Brian Swimme is a mathematical cosmologist on the graduate faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He brings a unique perspective to the understanding of the 13.7-billion-year trajectory of cosmic genesis, viewing humanity as having evolved out of, and being an integral part of, the universe as a whole.
Swimme's academic research focuses on the evolutionary dynamics of the universe, the relationship between scientific cosmology and more traditional religious visions, the cultural implications of the new evolutionary epic, and the role of humanity in the unfolding story of Earth and cosmos. Toward this goal, in 1989 he founded the Center for the Story of the Universe, a production and distribution affiliate of the California Institute of Integral Studies.
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Swimme is the author of The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos (Orbis, 1996), Manifesto for a Global Civilization (with Matthew Fox) (Bear and Company, 1983), The Universe is a Green Dragon (Bear and Company, 1984), and The Universe Story (Harper, 1992), which is the culmination of a ten-year collaboration with renowned cultural historian Thomas Berry.
Swimme was featured in the three-part television series Soul of the Universe (The BBC, 1991). He is the producer of a twelve-part video series, Canticle to the Cosmos (Tides Center, 1990), in which he tells the scientific story of the evolution of the universe. Swimme has also created and produced The Earth's Imagination (Center for the Story of the Universe, 1998), a video series about the evolutionary development of the human psyche.
Swimme received his Ph.D. (1978) from the University of Oregon specializing in gravitational dynamics, mathematical cosmology, and singularity theory. He was a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington from 1978 to 1981. Prior to that, he was a member of the faculty at the Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California. He lectures worldwide and has presented at conferences sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The World Bank, UNESCO, The United Nations Millennium Peace Summit, and the American Natural History Museum. He resides in northern California.
"In 1930 Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, a prominent leader in the American Jewish community of New York, fired off a telegram to Einstein. The rabbi did not waste words: "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words.”
The telegram was prompted by a public altercation that had arisen when Einstein published a statement that, to the consternation of some of his fellow scientists, he always referred to himself as"religious.”He had written:
"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”"
Harvey Fox, The Future of Faith
HarperOne (September 8, 2009) p. 21
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